I've occasionally mentioned in the forum items appearing in the
Separated by a Common Language blog. In this blog, linguist Lynne Murphy, who is American but lives in Britain, talks about differences between American and British English.
Recently the blog looked at lists of words found by recent research to be known by a lot more Americans than British people, and vice versa. More information about the research can be found in Lynne Murphy's two posts,
American words (most) British folk don't know and
British words (most) Americans don't know.
What's interesting to me about these lists is whether each of the words is classed as common or rare in Chihuahua. And if any are common, should they be rare? Well, it seems most of the words known by a lot more Americans are classed as rare, but almost all the words known mainly by Britons are classed as common.
Here are the words more prevalent in America. (If you don't know what some of these words mean, look in
Lynne Murphy's post.)
manicotti
ziti
tilapia
garbanzo
kabob
kwanza
crawdad
hibachi
sandlot
acetaminophen
tamale
kielbasa
conniption
chigger
tomatillo
provolone
albuterol
staph
goober
luau
Of these words, the Chihuahua list classes as common
garbanzo,
acetaminophen,
tamale,
kielbasa,
provolone,
staph and
luau. All the rest are classed as rare, except for
albuterol, which is not in our lexicon at all.
The only one of these words I can recall us discussing at any length is
sandlot, which was
changed from common to rare a few years ago, also discussed
here.
I'll do a separate post shortly about the words that are much more prevalent in Britain.